f13.net

Copped this from that other site, because I don't normally read stock price news.


Yeah, because when Madden 2005 is available in both new and used copies, for less than full price, someone really wants to pay full price for Madden 2003.

EA... making stupid exucses since 1980. I mean, what the fuck does the company expect? The only original titles they've put out either suck or were built by dev houses they no longer do business with (either because the dev houses smarted up, like Irrational, or got borged, like Westwood). Their catalog is one long line of shit, broken up by a few very rare bursts of mediocrity. And they should be worried about WoW, because their entire MMOG strategy has been a looping film clip of Wile E. Coyote opening a box only to have his face blown off ad infinitum.

Yet I'm sure that dumbass investors will buy their shares back up and bolster their share price right the fuck back up in time.

They need to go back to the old school flat boxes. Those were the bomb!

If WoW is having a significant impact on non-MMO sales I find that quite interesting. It never even occured to me that that might happen to be honest.

I am at a point where there are several games I would like to play that I haven't purchased simply because I do not have the time to play them- and WoW is a major reason why. Every time I get the urge to go buy a PC game, I look at the unopened copy of HL2 sitting on my desk. Has even slowed (but not stopped) my purchase of Xbox games.

I can't conceive of it not having an effect.  And the curious thing is that of the 10 or so people I personally know who would consider themselves MMO players, only 3 of them play it.  Sure, it's anecdotal, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if the majority playerbase for WoW is composed of MMO virgins.  Those are the kinds of folks that if they're currently playing and enjoying a game they aren't going to be rushing out to get the new shiny.

We're the freaks that don't finish most games before we're running out to pick up a new one.

Back during my catass EQ days as a guild leader, I think I spent about 2 years where I didn't buy a single new game. I didn't have time to play one, so why would I? I mean, I would likely put in 3 hours a night in EQ, and on nights I didn't play, I usually had some duty to perform for the guild that took up most of the night. Shit, I barely watched sports or movies, either. Of course, the other part of the reason I didn't play many games was I was flat broke most of the time then too, but still, the time factor was much bigger than the not having money for it factor. Though WoW is a more casual game, there's a shitload of people playing it, and they are probably buying less other games because of it.

Same here.

I agree, many of the MMO friends I know want to only play MMOs because of the value of the entertainment. $50 + $15 a month is pretty cheap compared to a new game every 2-4 weeks. If WoW did more than grab the current MMO population, then many will notice the money they saved.

I always thought this timeshare issue was obvious from a business perspective. This is why it is so difficult for me to understand why EA kept giving up on new MMOGs. Now, it is way too fucking late. If they want to compete, it is going to cost them $100MM AND talent. They have the former. For similar reasons I am baffled by Microsoft bailing out of the genre so fast. They spent/lost $2 BILLION on Xbox but dumped MMOGs after AC2 cost them, what, $10MM? Microsoft should be developing/funding 10 MMOGs as we speak. It is not even a goddamn rounding error.

Edit: I forgot about Vanguard, but they should be doing more.

Well, EA doesn't have to develop it, they can buy the companies developing the big name MMOs that are upcoming if they like. Probably go for some that just started development, like Gods and Heroes, Star Trek Online, etc.

I wouldn't buy Star Trek online. It's about to go through what Star Wars did in the 80's. Enterprise is leaving the air and Paramount has said maybe it is time to give Star Trek a break from the public eye.

Boooo...I always liked TNG.

It's not that the franchise needs a break, it's that they need new writers and marketing deals that don't suck.  My local cable company doesn't even carry UPN.  Not only that, put putting it on at Friday at 8PM???  They're putting Star Trek on UPN up against Stargate on SciFi.  Stupid, stupid, stupid.  SciFi Friday has (now) three shows lined up starting at 8.  What's a geek to do?

I don't know...I watch Law & Order reruns starting at 7pm EST...hehe

Though Stargate I still find to be interesting on the occasion I decide to watch it...

Richard Dean Anderson, For Teh Winzz0r!

My only complaint is that he never fixes things with paperclips or anything cool like that.  His talents are wasted on that show.

I did too. However, we're not talking reruns, we're talking new shows. They're saying they may not make new shows.

Space Vampire Nazis didn't help Enterprise and the franchise one bit.  Amazingly, it was a tired cliche before it was even new.

I suspect that EA and MS are staying away from the MMO market because they are heavily, and happily, invested in the console market, particularly MS with Xbox Live, and consoles compete with MMOs, see this discussion.  Sony has a different approach to the market than MS, as well as a winning MMO strategy (no longer #1, but still they have the only MMO stable on the planet), so they may be less MMO-adverse.

I understand Haemish's joy, but I can't be happy about any game company having issues.  If his hopes payoff, EA is in big trouble, and the market could easily follow it down, as has happened to this industry before.  Beyond that, if MMOs are just cannabillizing the game market, that is not a good thing, except for the PC game market, since MMOs offset the biggest issue with PC titles, piracy.

That was the last episode I saw.  I thought the season was good up until that episode.  No, even the episode was good; all they had to do was nuke the last 15 seconds of it.  Up until then, we'd been using Enterprise to go visit my in-laws (they have dish).  After that ending, none of us wanted to see anything else of the series.

I honestly wouldn't mind the industry big companies taking a hit.  I think another videogame crash is really what we need frankly.  Its too commercial and saturated right now.  The only problem is EA and Microsoft would probably survive and do the same crap they do now and it would mostly be the little guys who get hurt.  When they aren't the problem. 

...then don't hope for such a crash, becuase that's apparently not what we need.

I hope the entire gaming industry is annhilated in a massive market crash.  Then I can come here and read posts about how checkers suxx0rz and backgammon is teh pwn.   :-D

Everyone knows Mario was better than Sonic back in the day. But now Ratchet is better than Mario. Leon is better than any of the characters from Maniac Mansion. And the two Taiko dildo drumsticks are better than Donkey Kong.

Chess is better than both Checkers and backgammon. But Go is teh pwn. It owns them with easy.

I'm glad EA doing poorly, its time they took a hit for rampaging idiocy and shitting unfinished product on customer's heads.

With regards to WoW - I'm glad that its WoW and not SimsOL or equally shitty product that hit it big. Larger overall mmorpg player base means we are less of a niche and that is good thing. Even if most players enjoying otherwise unumbitious and bland WoW in 5 years they will want something better and it will likely be available.

Checkers are PvP and we all know from your posts only griefers would want PvP in their games. You got to 'jump' your opponent's checker without consent, oh the horror. You should not be allowed to intrude on your opponent's fun - you should be only allowed to move your checkers without 'jumping' Only 12 year old antisocials with serious mental issues would want to do 'jumping'.

Actually, you missed what was probably the BEST season of Enterprise.  There were several really good episodes this year that, had they actually done during the 1st year, could quite possibly have saved the show.

Bruce

(http://www.dis.anl.gov/ep/cm/picts/trainwreck.jpg)

Jesus, your blatant trolling is pathetic.

Checkers is PVP with rules.  So blow me.

And Chess owns all.  Since it is PVP with simplistic rules that make for a infinitely complex game.

Did I mention 'Blow Me' ?

The analogy you are searching for is the 12 year old antisocials ignoring the rules of checkers and jumping around on the board like they want, because "otherwise the game mechanics wouldn't make it possible to put your pieces everywhere on the board". Oh yes, and they would run out of the room and hide after pulling this trick, so that you can't punch them into the face for their behaviour. Just to return a few days later with a false moustache.

You can blow me as soon as you are done blowing Ironwood twice. But please brush your teeth inbetween.

Is there a line forming?

Bruce

I think whenever someone on the board busts out any kind of analogy for gaming I can automatically assume the thread has gone to hell.

And you don't have to blow me, I don't know where Ironwood has been.

Though in the first season, Sam Carter did say she was going to 'macguyver' the DHD on a remote planet...

EA: The reason for our shitty sales was anything but our being corporate shitbags that stifle innovation and creativity, nor our business plan of buying up talent and watering it down with our infrastructure and administration, nor the disolution of said dev houses later. It's clearly because of the hardware market, and mmogs. Now...that doesn't mean we'll actually ship a new mmog to replace our 8-yr-old warhorse, in fact we'll waste a ton of cash to....err, strike that last part, ok?

It'd be funnier if it weren't true, imo.

We'll waste a ton of cash...

Signing exclusive licensing deals with sports leagues and buying up as many other publishers and dev houses as you dumb-ass investors will continue to pay for. Then we'll make hats of money out of your savings and wallow around in puddles of our own filth fiddling while the game industry goes down with us.

Fuck you, Larry.

EA may be hurting their bottom line, but it's got to be incredible pressure on the smaller dev shops to compete.

Given that the founders of Perpetual left EA en masse after working on TSO, I'd call that particular option as about as likely as me returning to Turbine.

And on the off-topic of Enterprise, the new fourth season writing team also thought the Space Vampire Nazis were stupid, and tried to shuffle off that plot (and the whole retarded "temporal cold war" concept) as quickly as possible.

One thing that bugs me about america in general and capitalism in particular, is that this is a /good/ thing. Put the other guys out of business, put their families on the street, survival of the fittest. At any cost. Must win.

At least it jibes with the christian beliefs of so many american capitalists.

It's the Shadowbane principle. Winning doesn't mean shit if you can't make the defeated quit the game.

Heh..never heard it said that forcing people to quit the game was a desired thing...most of the time that was one of the fundamental design flaws in people's minds--when you got defeated, you gave up and quit the game, therefore lowering the server population.

Not that your point isn't a valid one at all--long term consequences of winning/losing are important...just hadn't heard it phrased that way, and I personally think forcing them out of the game entirely is counter-productive.

Watch out, that's a sarcasm truck bearing down on you at 90 mph.

I'll buy that Haem, winning is much more satisfying if it comes with absolute destruction none of this respawn button bullshit.    :evil:  They should have to start from scratch.  I played a fairly successful mmog where that type of winning was possible.  Hell yeah it burned people out but they always came back.  Also it was no easy freaking task to newbie lock somebody...

*sigh*  There's something to be said for not only destroying the castle but then burning the land it was on, then plowing it with salt and kill anyone else who may of known about the castle in the goal of erasing it from history.

The only problem is that the people whose land just got salted don't want to keep paying the MMOG subscription company for salted virtual land. So they quit. And with them, all that fat money.

Dev team goes broke, publisher closes down the game.

You learned wrong lesson. Winning is not a good thing if defeated quit the game - you end up with one boring sim game and nothing to do. Nowdays ever SB's 'greif crews' avoid pissing off people to the point that they quit.

We really do need a sarcasm tag. I thought I was making a funny, and suddenly, it's taken seriously.

Maybe a font color dripping with green slime to indicate sarcasm?

Heheh...the reason I didn't take it as sarcasm is because to an extent, it's true: defeating someone meant nothing--especially folks like gank squads. At worst, they logged off until the next day, and were right back at their ways the next day. To bring up my mantra again (sorry!)--without persistent consequences, the game events (defeating an enemy) meant pretty much zero--and therefore after the player base tries it a few times, they start playing the game in the easiest manner, instead of the intended one.

/agree

Its not sarcasm because the balance between "salting the earth" and "protecting the people who dont have thick skin" is the struggle in pvp. 

On one hand you have WoW:
PvP so meaningless I think that pvp servers eventually had less pvp then the pve servers.  Uncapturable towns, bind rushing galore, not even a durability penalty.  Oh and a 30sec death run in many areas with lots of fighting.  But wait!  They are going to make instanced zones where you can fight with a purpose, destroying the enemy base which will then rebuild itself automatically so you can destroy it again in 10minutes!

On the other hand you have 10six/SB:
PvP that burns people out because you have to defend your assets 24/7 and that means the more time you spend online the better, loosing city/camps is a huge blow in resources/time investment and power.  Players are able to literally scatter other guilds to the wind (it didn't work perfectly in SB due to dummy cities under fake guild tags).  PvP where there are times that the loser has nothing really to do but quit for at least a little while.

I know which one I prefer. Three guesses.

In pure capitalism terms, with profit as nothing but the motive, the Shadowbane principle is in full effect. However, for a society to function correctly, that has to be tempered with the idea that monopolies are generally bad fucking ideas for everyone except those with a financial stake in said monopoly.

I do absolutely agree, winning has to have costs as well as benefits for long term viability. A perfect example of this (don't shoot me, I've only got access to a laptop for the last 9 weeks) is Risk/Risk II--the 'winners always win' snafu is amazing. In many games I've played against the AI lately, I can point to a single turn, and even in some cases a single battle, where the game was won...even if it wasn't -over- for another 20 turns.

And that's a bitch to design for.

Anyway, in a feeble attempt to re-rail this post: Does anyone think that the not-so-silent boycott by the gamer community has anything to do with EA's less than expected earnings?

Not a chance, not unless media shows EA developers sweatshops in 9'clock news and make big deal out of it. We are minority and our boycott is a drop in a sea.

Not a chance, not unless media shows EA developers sweatshops in 9'clock news and make big deal out of it.

Yeah, well the problem with capitalism here is imperfect information.  Capitalism assumes that consumers are perfectly rationale and, even more damning, that they know the effects of their actions.  If people had a better understanding of what it meant for their future to support certain asshole companies then capitalism might work out someday.  But that's like asking MMO players not to grief -- a nice ideal but probably not going to happen without some major infrastructure and a lot of insight that we don't currently have.

As for PvP systems-- I'll take DAoC's as a good balance.  Meaningful objectives and whatnot to drive fun PvP -- but enough distance between players that personalities don't take over and griefing isn't rampant.  Too bad they had such bad buffbotting issues (and I hear the second expansion did more harm than good -- but I didn't play it so I don't know).

Gabe.

That happened to me with UO.  I'd buy a new game, play it for 10 minutes, and miss UO.  Eventually I stopped buying other games.

I turned Enterprise off after I heard the theme song, when the series debuted.

UO had PvP rules, so blow me.

Yeah.  SB done right would have the entire population band together to fight off the "crushers", win, and then fracture into a bunch of smaller empires in the disputes after victory... which would lead to the game starting all over again.

Unfortunately, the SB people didn't set up their game to handle everyone jumping on one side from the get go.

I argued repeatedly that SB would have worked a hell of allot better with server movement implemented from the getgo.  I'm not going to go into detail but I'm damn sure it would have stopped the perpetual winner syndrome everyone here is so worried about.

*added*
It doesn't delay the inevitable if you believe that ego's will eventually override the desire to zerg 4tw.  Which I most definately do believe.

No, it would only have delayed it a while.  Not that it wouldn't have helped, particularly since it would have introduced geographiic restrictions at the runegates, but it would have been delaying the inevitable.  And there probably would have been some huge bug that would have made the whole thing into some kind of exploit.

Shockeye and I both participated in about a 4 month conflict (first as allies, eventually as enemies, although it was good to have him feeding me information occasionally!) between a lore based nation (mine), and a "ganker turned guild--kind of" based nation that almost turned out pretty ok, and then went all to shit.

Basically, they were griefers, we were anti-griefers (based on our internally written "lore"), and we spent several months consolidating territory and pretty much left each other alone while we each did our consolidation. I honestly think both sides did their best to stay out of each other's way while the consolidation period was happening, but occasional poor diplomacy (first one was on my part, second was on theirs) caused a couple of failed banes (we interrupted theirs in their territory, they interrupted ours against an aggressor), and then wound up escalating quickly into a view on their part summed by "ok, we're done with this shit, destroy their capital". They tried for a couple of weeks (4+ banes if I remember correctly), and tore us a new asshole in our capital city, but never did complete the ToL destruction.

The problem turned out to be that even though the server as a whole tried like hell to only fight in battles/banes that made sense (regional, conquest for territory, etc.), the absolute lack of game mechanics supporting this in any way made it too damn hard for all of us (including those not directly in our war) to stay the hell out of each other's battles.

Perfect example: before this ganker guild went "mainstream" and built up a city, they would bane anyone they chose, and gank all over the place. Even though they did turn "mainstream" and built a city, all of the server's pent up frustration at their history turned the end of the conflict into what we called an "add-fest", where people totally unrelated to a particular war would show up and fight.

When they finally gave up trying to destroy our capital, much of their guild dispersed/went to a new server, and I elected to not destroy their capital since "the threat was gone (lore, again)". Unfortunately, the rest of the freaking server decided that wasn't good enough, and brought easily a 100+ (which was a lot) force to blow up their island city. Hell, I was so frustrated that after 8+ months of the server steadily moving towards "sieges for reason" instead of "sieges for gank", and then all of it going to hell with that final siege, I brought a small crew of alts with me to actually try and -defend- the remainder of their cities--a total violation of my own "stay the fuck out of other people's fights" beliefs.

Ultimately, I wound up playing my last couple of months of Shadowbane on their side of the game, grief/ganking anyone and everyone right alongside some of them. I think that a better design in how to handle "power begets power", some form of persistent, but not "force to quit" consequences, as well as a better mode of play for the killer-motivated types would have alleviated the forces that caused the whole issue in the first place, but hell, who knows!

Lore based conflict would've been a great way to go if everyone played along. However, there was no reason for people to play along so the assholes would always come out on top.

Yes, exactly--and without game mechanics that make "positive" (meaningful for that game at least) conflict easier than "negative" (meaningless/ganking/griefing/whatever) conflict, players will follow that easiest path...many times because they have to.

Your idealistic approach to SB surprises me, you must be one of 'em RollPlayas. On my server politics dictated who would show or not at any given bane and generally if you could show up at a bane you would.

I do agree that in SB nothing was done to keep conflicts regional and localized, as a result most important fights were huge clusterfuck zergfests. SB falls short in this department since there are no downsides to fighting across the world and there is very little land control outside of your city walls.

I personally think that instant teleportation in PvP game removes any chance of localized conflict. Simple way to make most conflict in SB regional is to remove summoning, now all the sudden distance makes huge difference. Add on top of that some value to open space, say an ability to create recourse-producing or guard-producing structures and you have reason to fight your neighbors.

Well, we were one of the servers that got hit pretty hard by the "Beta Guild Dominance" syndrome the first 3-4 months, and once they imploded, we realized that if you didn't provide reasons for conflict, people would drop to the lowest denominator by default, so yes, we "roleplayed" a nation that many would love and many would hate to try to maintain a good level of warfare on the server without making it "everyone against 1 nation" like it had been for the last 4 months. It mostly worked actually, except for the ending. The whole scenario was the basis of my concept of managing conflict within a virtual world, and as an experiment it mostly succeeded--and it did prove that without game designs built in to manage the issues involved, ultimatley it would break down.

Yes, I agree completely on your ideas regarding summoning, territorial control, and resources. Summoning is a touchy one, because players simply do not want to have to walk endless distances to get anywhere, for valid reasons, so yo do need some form of mass/rapid transit. So far the only thing that I have come up with as a reasonable solution is to allow players themselves to have instant travel, but also to make sure that individual players, even at the group/raid level, are not necessarily the most powerful warfare assets. Think of them as highly mobile but limited firepower aircaft if you will--they can accomplish a lot, but wars aren't won with them and them alone.

I don't think that you have to provide instant travel in your game for it to be enjoyable. Ideal solution is to build world rich enough that you can have enough points of interest within traveling distance but make sure that traveling distance isn't everywhere.

A succinct summary of the griefer issue, I'd say.

The real key is to design game flow so that experienced players are not traversing trivial areas to get to challenging areas.